Prior to computers and sophisticated tracking methods, it was difficult to organize your customers into groups. With the advent of computers and the internet it's much easier to group your customers and target your marketing, but most people incorrectly assume that only your internet advertising can be specifically segmented and targets.

In the last 3 Daily Golden Nuggets, I provided ideas on how you could use segmentation to increase the response rates of your traditional media in hopes that I could dispel the myth that segmentation is only for digital advertising. In today's Nugget I'll briefly explain the idea of "Search Engine Marketing" (SEM) and why so many online marketing guys use it as one of their buzz words.

Let me first give you an overview of what Search Engine Marketing is... It's basically the overall catchphrase that includes all the possible ways that you can have your company information appear in a search engine. What makes it "marketing" is the fact that you are intentionally publishing specific types of "information" that your target customer will be looking for.

Those 8 examples aren't in any particular order, just how I thought of them. The written content on your site and those blog posts are probably the more important of those, with YouTube videos followed next.

Implementing SEM will sound pretty easy as you read this example. Assume that you just started carrying Nomination's You-Cool line of bracelets. This bracelet style comes in 10 colors of woven copper fibers. It's a low ticket item that customers will either like, or not.

Nomination is trying to push this bracelet line and customers who are interested will search for "you cool" or "nomination you cool" in Google. In order to attract the attention of those customers you need to include the phrase "you cool" on your website.

This is where the "marketing" comes into play. Google will not include your website in search results unless "you cool" appears on your website. According to my list above you could easily post photos, a video, blog entry, a PDF, share You-Cool posts to social media, and pay for online ads that say "You-Cool." That's 6 methods where you intentionally mention "you cool" online.

You wouldn't spend all that time mentioning information about Nomination's line unless you were trying to sell it. Therefore SEM refers to any online activity you perform with the intent to sell something.

I'm going to break the SEM process down a little more in my next Nugget on Segmentation, which will be on Monday. In that Nugget I'll explain how to write blog posts specific to targeted keyword phrases, like You-Cool.

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